The Economist has a chart showing a network visualization of several world economic forum attendees. It's interesting to see how connected the attendees are, but it's hard to get much else out of the visualizations. It would be a lot easier if the edges and labels showed up before you hovered over the nodes. It's really hard to pull out meaningful insights from the graphs as they are. For example, the article says, "Among the findings that the data-visualisation reveals is the degree to which Catalyst, a New York-based charity that helps women in the workplace, has links to many Davos goers," but to see this you have to hover over the nodes one by one until you find that charity, and even then you can't compare it to other nodes without hovering over all of them too.

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About the Blog

This is a blog about social interactions. When people interact and influence one another's choices, the resulting macro level dynamics can be complex, astounding, horrific, and/or beautiful. In my research, I use modeling to try and understand how social interactions give rise to this astounding diversity of phenomena. The blog is a place for me to make more casual observations about social dynamics in the news, in my research, in other people's research, and in everyday life.